Why Don't You Have Any Pants On?

I wish I could be endearingly awkward. Instead I'm just...well..awkward. If I was clumsy in a cute way, I might be sitting at a posh coffee shop and may, perhaps, get a tiny bit of foam from my latte on my upper lip. It would be so adorable that Greg would just have to kiss it off. Or maybe, I would drop a handkerchief in the path of a knight riding on a white horse and..... Ok, ok...but you get the picture. 

In my non-fairy tale life, I am constantly making a fool of myself by dropping a whole bowl of crab soup in my lap as the waiter is handing it to me or bumping my beer over at happy hour..on  Friday... in front of a whole table...of new co-workers. Dang it. 

In middle school, I once sneezed and chewed up carrot came out of my nose and squirted all over the lunch table. Another time, I was harshly pointing my fork at my sister while giving her my two cents about some (now long-forgotten) topic and the maccaroni noodle flug from my fork and landed (and stuck to) the tip of her nose. Her terrified eyes crossed staring down at her nose with the noodle sticking straight up into the air. 

Today at lunch I was cutting my apple pie and the hard crust broke off, launched into the air, and hit a co-worker right in the breast. Good Lord. 

But, by far, the worst recent calamity happened just a few months ago and it wasn't even close to endearing.  It was still my first week at my new school. The kids hadn't even come back yet. We had a faculty meeting that morning, so the whole staff was going to be there. I got up bright and early, showered, and put on my brand new linen shorts and a shirt. I realized that it was pouring down rain, but I had to let the dogs out. While they did their business, I turned the dyer on to fluff up the laundry that had finished the night before. Then, I made a large cup of coffee and placed it on the dining room table. I went back into the mud room and opened the door for the dogs. Rylee came in chewing on something enormous in his tiny little mouth. He chews on mulch sometimes, so I dug my finger in there to pull it out. Except it wasn't mulch. It was a giant, gooey, disgusting cicada! All that I could distinguish was that there were guts and a wing left. The bug stuck to my index finger, I screamed and flung it on the mud room floor. I ran, squealing, into the dining room flapping my hands to get any residual bug-gunk off. I decided to let Greg clean up the carcass, so I left it there, not a smart plan I would find out.  Trying to get a grip, but still in a tizzy, I took my running clothes out of my work bag, since it was raining. In the process, I knocked over the large cup of coffee, which I didn't realize had been teetering on the edge of a stack of papers. It fell squarely on my new shorts, right in the crotch, spreading from pocket to pocket. Fuming, I ripped off my shorts in the middle of the dining room (surely waking up Greg by this point) and stomped into the mud room to get a new pair of pants from the dryer. Obviously I wasn't that affected by the squashed cicada, because as I stomped in, I mashed the cold gloppy bug guts into the arch of my foot. Again I screamed, but this time it was like a growl-scream, angry and terrified. In my underwear, I flapped and kicked my foot every which way until the goo finally slapped onto the side of the washing machine. I came out of the mud room looking frazzled and distraught and there was Greg standing in his sweats rubbing sleep from his eyes. He looked at me bewildered and said confusedly, "Why don't you have any pants on?"